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IN HIS first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI referred to the “growing secularism of many Christians engaged in charitable work”. In this study Frank Prochaska claims that “many Christian charities have watered down their religious image in recent decades.” There is some support for both claims, but many qualifications and clarifications are needed.

Prochaska’s book examines Christian social work in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and notes the expansion of state activity after 1945 (though it had begun earlier). Social historians such as José Harris have drawn attention to the lack of political analysis during the years of this expansion, but there is no discussion of that in this book. Nor, though he is concerned about the decline of Christian social witness, is there any attention paid to the theological motivation of this witness.

The book consists of six chapters, two entitled “Background” and “Foreground”, and four that examine schooling (including Sunday schools), visiting, mothering (the mothers’ meetings and the Mothers’ Union), and nursing. Together they describe the rise and decline of these activities, locating the fate of Christian social ministries within the changing climate of the democratic state machine.

The mass of data is impressive, particularly that on parish visitors; and the decline in these areas of work certainly left large gaps that have not been adequately replaced by secular social work. While most of the material seems to have come from secondary sources, it is good to have it so conveniently gathered in one book.

There are, however, some highly questionable claims, often injected into the text without any context or argument. The statement that Christian socialism “ultimately proved more hospitable to socialism than to Christianity” would be hard to defend, historically or theologically. To say that the Evangelical conscience “was largely exhausted” after the Second World War, except where it was “transformed into Christian Socialism” as with Donald Soper, is equally odd (as Soper himself would certainly have thought).

Even odder, from a historian, are the occasional polemical asides, such as: “What was the point of worshipping in Westminster Abbey when Jesus, now a socialist, had departed for Whitehall?” Or: “Those who retained their faith often found new causes overseas,” such as Christian Aid and CAFOD. The author says that “in Christian circles and in the media, the hubbub over gay rights and women priests has drowned out reports of the social work carried out by the Churches.” This does at least concede that this work is continuing — much of it, in fact, supported or initiated by women priests. But such comments trivialise both the debate and the book.

Even more questionable is what appears to be the central thesis. I say “appears to be”, for it is not clear.  The most the author says is that the growth of government and the decline of religion were “trends that were not unrelated to each other”. He later adds that “the decline of Christianity may have had more to do with the extension of democracy than with Darwinism or the higher criticism” (my italics).

The publisher’s blurb on the cover, however, claims that “the waning of religion and the growth of government responsibility for social provision were closely inter-twined.” This calls for more analysis rather than simple assertion.

At one point the author says that the Churches accepted a “collectivist secular world without redemptive purpose”. Can a secular world have a redemptive purpose? Did the Churches accept such a world? If this was so, the book does not provide the evidence. Rather, there is an illogical jump from the accumulated data to the conclusion of a causal connection.

Undoubtedly there has been both an expansion of state activity and a decline in membership of some Churches over the period of time discussed. But, as statisticians would have told the author, close parallelisms or contrasts between curves are notoriously uninformative.

The Revd Kenneth Leech was formerly Community Theologian at St Botolph’s, Aldgate, in east London.

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